


Letter of Recommendation

by Schrodingers_Rufus



Series: Location: Remote [2]
Category: Half-Life
Genre: Clones, Gen, Temporary Character Death, feelings are hard
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 01:40:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29959026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schrodingers_Rufus/pseuds/Schrodingers_Rufus
Summary: Based on an Alternate Freeman idea posted by ArdeaWrites (ardeawritten) on Tumblr:"The Freeman sent back to earth is a clone. Every time Freeman dies in-game, that’s another clone body. The original is controlling them from stasis, experiencing every death, do-over and retry."Gordon Freeman brings some new information to the White Forest science team.
Series: Location: Remote [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2203434
Kudos: 25





	Letter of Recommendation

Gordon blinked, squinting under the harsh lights of Kleiner’s storage-warehouse-turned-laboratory. His hand stopped halfway up to his face, a lifelong instinct replaced with a newer one. This time, though, he could ignore it.  _ No gloves, no contaminants.  _ With some mental effort, he overrode the newer instinct and reached under his glasses, wiping the crusted rheum from the corners of his eyes. 

The previous night, they’d agreed to sleep in shifts; it seemed that none of them particularly wanted to head back to their individual rooms. Watch took the chair, and the other two split the sofa. 

Gordon kept an eye on the clock. Somehow, Alyx and Barney had managed to give him the shortest watch shift, the longest span of uninterrupted sleep. He tried to thank them, but Barney had just winked, clapped him on the back, and said he had no idea what Gordon was talking about. With that, the three had headed towards the labs.    
  
The worst conversation was over, and it all went more smoothly than Gordon had anticipated. 

It was superstitious, he knew, but he still felt like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. The human mind was entirely too good at pattern recognition, and so far, the pattern had been:  _ Breathe while you can, because around the corner something’s waiting to kill you. Sleep while you can, because tomorrow will be worse. _

“Oh, Eli!” Kleiner’s familiar voice cut through Gordon’s ruminating. “Thank goodness Alyx was able to track you down! Did she tell you why you were invited here?”

“She told me--” Dr. Vance glanced between Alyx and Gordon with a thin, wry grin. “--that our resident Strider exterminator had something he wanted to tell us. In confidence.”

“To be fair,” Gordon started, hoping his expression was close enough to Eli’s for his tone to come across. “I couldn’t have done it without Dr. Magnusson’s help.” He caught Kleiner’s eye. “I’ll name him second on the paper.”

Kleiner choked, Alyx and Barney wheezed, and a careful, silent grin spread across Eli’s face. He shook his head, suppressing laughter. “I noticed you didn’t invite him to this meeting.”

Gordon shrugged. “He should know eventually. He doesn’t have to know  _ right now. _ ”

“God damn.” Barney shook his head. “And here I forgot for a second you were on the science team.”   
  
Kleiner’s eyebrows raised as he turned to Barney. “And are we to assume that the Black Mesa security force was  _ entirely _ without their own internal squabbles?”

“Oh, sure we did, Doc. They just tended to be a little more...” He socked his fist into his hand. “... _ direct _ , is all.”

“Oh, bull _ shit, _ ” Gordon signed, rolling his eyes at Barney. “I had to log a hundred hours in the firing range, so don’t try and tell me the security guards don’t gossip.”

Barney sputtered a failed comeback, and out of the corner of his eye, Gordon caught Alyx’s expression. She looked _delighted_ . 

Her father gestured gently at Gordon and Barney, a quiet  _ break it up, break it up. _ “Snide remarks about our colleagues aside, what was it you wanted to discuss, Gordon?”

Barney and Alyx tensed next to him.    
  
Gordon let out a near-silent huff of air. He put this off long enough.

“I should have told you this sooner. I should have told  _ all _ of you this sooner.” 

Breathe in, two, three. Breathe out, two, three. 

“The body you’re looking at isn’t my body. It’s a copy--a decoy.” He’d spent his shift on watch the previous night running through the words in his head, listing the important points. He still wasn’t happy with them, but at least they were coming out a little easier this time. He kept his eyes trained on the ground, kept his breathing steady,  _ didn’t _ look at his mentors. “I’m controlling it remotely. I’m being held somewhere else. I don’t know where. I don’t know why.”   
  
He forced himself to look up, to look at Eli’s stricken expression, to catch his eye. “It’s not Combine.”

He held Eli’s gaze, letting the pause hang there, expectant. 

Eli’s eyes widened in recognition.

Gordon took that as his cue to break eye contact, returning his stare to the floor. The floor didn’t look at him like it was grieving a loved one.    
  
“I told Barney and Alyx before I came here. They didn’t know until now. Everyone I’ve told is in this room.”

He paused.    
  
“I’m sorry. I should have told you sooner.”

Gordon let his hands fall to his sides. He still didn’t look up. 

Kleiner spoke first, and it wasn’t with the cadence he expected. His voice didn’t climb higher, faster, the way it did when he’d spotted an interesting puzzle, an anomaly in the data, an unexpected result he wanted to sink his teeth into. Instead, his voice was soft, and it cracked, and all he said was, “Oh, Gordon...”

Something inside Gordon  _ broke. _

_That’s what did it,_ he thought, through a haze of red-faced embarrassment, through the silent sobs wrenching their way out of him, through the sticky tears and snot dripping down his face. He hadn’t cried like this after the Resonance Cascade. He hadn’t cried like this when he saw what was left of the Earth under Combine rule. He hadn’t cried this hard since _undergrad_ , since the day the stress and the isolation and the novelty of _every aspect of college life_ all collided at once, since the day he wept his eyes out during Dr. Kleiner’s office hours because of all that but also because one of the TAs had taken forty points off his exam for an incorrect answer, but it _wasn’t incorrect_ , and he knew it, and if he couldn’t do _this one thing right then why the hell was he here,_ _but maybe the professor knew he was right, the real professor, not some condescending grad student with a red pen,_ and Kleiner, who had never seen him as anything but a tiny face in a massive lecture hall, had fretted and offered him tissues and had understood sign language perfectly and hadn’t talked down to him and had gone through the problem line by line to see what happened.

(The grad student had been wrong, but Gordon’s answer did have an error. Kleiner hadn’t dwelled on it, had just nudged him gently toward the right answer and  _ beamed _ when Gordon put it together.)

So maybe that’s why he was crying. 

God, he didn’t know. 

At some point he’d been bundled into Kleiner’s office chair. There was smeared ink on his hands. Had he put his wet hands on somebody’s notes? There were sheets of paper spread haphazardly across the floor near Kleiner’s desk. He didn’t think they had been there before.

“Sorry,” Gordon managed, with shaky hands.

“No need to apologize, no need at all,” Kleiner reassured him quickly. “It’s an awful lot to take in.” Gordon could feel Kleiner’s hand resting lightly on his shoulder. There was a new weight there, too--a vest. Eli’s vest. Eli had draped his vest over Gordon’s shoulders. 

Gordon breathed in, feeling the wet drag of mucus inside his nose, the burn of salt on his face, and he pulled himself to his feet. Carefully, he tugged the vest down from his shoulders and offered it back to Eli. He held his hands up, refusing to take it at first, but Gordon just held it out until he took it.

Breathe, two, three.    
  
Assess your surroundings. 

Barney had his back pressed against the wall, watching. Alyx was on the ground, picking up the fallen papers and shuffling them back into the proper order. She kept glancing up at Gordon. He didn’t meet her eyes. Eli shrugged the vest back on, still watching, and Kleiner hovered nearby, hands up like he was expecting Gordon to topple over at any moment .  
  
Gordon’s glasses were crusted with salt.   
  
He did one last scan of the room before removing his glasses, spitting into his hand, and scrubbing off the remnants of his meltdown with saliva and the hem of his borrowed t-shirt. Unsanitary, but better than grinding salt into the glass.

He settled his glasses back into place.

“Now,” Gordon signed, holding his hands steady. “Are any of you familiar with this kind of technology?”


End file.
